Trust. Enbridge Inc. is willing to spend millions to gain yours, and to a degree it seems it’s been successful.

The Canadian energy company may never quite fade into the oblivion it enjoyed before July 25, 2010. That was the day that a ruptured pipeline and negligence combined with incompetence sent more than 1 million gallons of tar sands oil into Talmadge Creek just south of Marshall, from where it oozed some 30 miles downstream in the Kalamazoo River like, as Enquirer storyteller Chuck Carlson wrote, “some Old Testament pestilence.”

Virtually nobody here had heard of Enbridge before that disaster, and as we approach its fifth anniversary, it’s a good bet you’d get nothing but a blank stare from a lot local folks if you asked them their opinion of the company. Perhaps that shouldn’t surprise anybody. As Michael Barcelona, a chemistry professor at Western Michigan University who has studied the impact of the spill says, “people tend to move on.”

Harder to wrap one’s brain around is the assessment of some, including many if not most of our elected leaders, that Enbridge the company is praiseworthy in its conduct since that spill. Certainly, we can be appreciative of company executives’ efforts to make it right. Enbridge invested heavily in amelioration efforts, not simply in cleanup, but by buying homes, building parks, underwriting public radio and supporting many charitable initiatives.

One might even make a credible case that the cleanup effort alone — with its army of company and contract workers — helped keep local businesses afloat in what was a crippling economic recession. Glennie Swann, an 87-year-old Ceresco resident who has lived near the river for more than 50 years, probably speaks for a lot of people when she says she has no complaints about Enbridge.

“They did an excellent job,” she said.

It’s an odd thing about our culture that we’re willing to grant so much latitude to a company that’s driven by one thing and one thing only: profit.

Whatever good Enbridge has done since that summer day in 2010 should be looked at in the context of a company simply guarding its interests. It should be looked at in the context of its conduct throughout North America and in the context of its history, which includes several hundred spills of tens of millions of gallons of crude.

Enbridge, like most large corporations, will do anything to curry political favor to achieve its goals, and it has many powerful allies who are eager to ease ecological and regulatory barriers, whether it’s reclassifying threatened species or, as one Michigan lawmaker proposed, insulating the presence of its infrastructure from public scrutiny.

Enbridge — with its lobbyists, lawyers and consultants — are masters of the political system. Even the fines it pays might be seen as an investment, the cost of doing business. The people who stand in protest — such as Chris Wahmhoff, for whom victory is not going to jail for simply disrupting the company’s pipeline work for a few hours — cannot make the same claim.

Over the next several weeks, our reporters will use this anniversary as an opportunity to re-examine the impact of the disaster, the lessons learned since, and the extent to which our community remains at risk.

Our intent is not to vilify Enbridge, but to see it for what it is — an energy company that exploits demand in the pursuit of enormous profits — and to remind readers that the Kalamazoo River oil spill represents an epic regulatory and industrial failure that was both predictable and preventable.

Let’s not confuse trust with complacency. Any multinational company will ask for the former, but it’s counting on the latter. It should receive neither.